190 - Dodge This
I watched a TED Talk by Brian Michael Bendis this morning. You will most likely know him as the writer of all of the Ultimate Spider-Man comics. The fact that he’s written all of them, and the series has been as consistently good as it has been, is a feat of its own. He also teaches a class on writing graphic novels at Portland State University. He also has had a hand in all of the Marvel movies since Iron Man. Where he finds the time to do all of these things is beyond me. Needless to say, he’s fairly talented.
Anywho, this TED Talk was about making comics... big surprise, I know. But the thing that stuck out to me was him pushing people to just get out there and create things for the joy of it. It reminded me of some similar advice that I once received from David Mack a few years ago. I mentioned that I wanted to do a webcomic (this was 2-3 years before I started this comic) and the piece of advice that I keep going back to from that conversation was, paraphrased:
Just get something out there.
Don’t wait until what you’re working on is ‘perfect’ because it won’t be.
Once you’ve got something out there, learn from the mistakes that you made with it & do better with the next comic.
It took me another couple of years to finally get up the courage to post something, and it certainly was not perfect. It was, however, something that I learned a lot from and certainly gave me a place to grow from. In his talk, Mr. Bendis spoke about making it in the comics industry simply by creating comics. It was the validation that sometimes we all really need from time to time and I was tremendously grateful to hear it.
Consider this my encouragement for you to create something. Create anything. Just take the gifts that you have or that you want to have and make something of them. Do something terrifying and put yourself out there. You might be surprised to find yourself discovering a new passion that will change your life.
-Tom 5.23.2014
